Christianity Today September 23, 2026 8 min signal 2026-09-23

Christians came together to help defeat UK's assisted dying bill

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Christianity Today

September 23, 2026

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Guy Smallman / Contributor / Getty

When Alicia Edmund heard the Parliament vote count for the UK’s assisted dying bill last week—286 noes to 270 ayes—her immediate reaction was shock. The bill had been defeated.

As head of policy for the Evangelical Alliance in the UK, Edmund had spent countless hours in the past two years briefing evangelicals on how to share their concerns with their members of Parliament (MPs) and coordinating campaign efforts with other Christian groups to defeat the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.

While sitting in the public gallery of the Palace of Westminster as the House of Commons gathered last Friday, she had already prepared herself for defeat and the need to “go again” at fighting the legislation, she said.

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“When the deputy speaker said 286 against, I thought, That’s not high enough. And when she said 270 for … I was silent,” Edmund recalled. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Normally a lot of our work is making the case for delay and disruption, whereas this one we won outright and it felt quite weird,” she said. “It felt different. It was a momentary celebration of ‘Lord, you can do all things.’”

The vote followed nearly two years of passionate debate over assisted dying in England. Kim Leadbeater, a Labour Party MP from the North of England, first introduced the bill in October 2024. The bill would have allowed adults to request assistance from doctors to end their own lives, provided they had mental capacity, were terminally ill, and were in their final six months of life.

The bill passed narrowly in the publicly elected House of Commons by just 23 votes last year. But it stalled in the appointed House of Lords, where members submitted more than 1,200 amendments and time ran out, prompting supporters to complain that the bill had been “undemocratically filibustered by a small number of peers.”

The legislation returned to the House of Commons in June, presented by another Labour MP, Lauren Edwards, who described it as “one of the most important, compassionate, and empowering changes to healthcare we’ve seen in a generation.”

The legislation generated intense debate not only in Parliament but also among the public as people debated what dignity, choice, and compassion mean when it comes to dying. More than a decade ago, supporters of assisted suicide presented a similar bill to MPs, and it was easily defeated.

Members of the Evangelical Alliance, which represents 30,000 individual members and 3,000 member churches, let the organization’s leadership know early in the bill’s journey that they were concerned, Edmund said. It was not difficult to mobilize them to campaign against its passage.

“Of all of our public policy areas, death is probably the most common experience: People have experienced a loved one who has died, they themselves have a view on that, and faith engages very directly to the heart of that,” she said.

Not every Evangelical Alliance member opposed the bill. Edmund recalled attending one local church meeting in 2025 where some congregants spoke out in favor of the legislation. For instance, George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury who held evangelical beliefs, announced in 2014 that he had changed his mind on euthanasia after witnessing the suffering of Tony Nicklinson, a man paralyzed by locked-in syndrome. Nicklinson died shortly after losing a High Court battle to gain assistance to end his own life.

But among the Evangelical Alliance’s base, Edmund found overwhelming opposition to the change. Part of her team’s work entailed educating evangelicals about what was at stake and “myth busting,” she said. Some in the church needed to be “reawakened” to Christianity’s distinctive theological framing: from Genesis’s description of humanity as made in God’s image to the tension of waiting for the new heaven and earth.

The Evangelical Alliance was also working behind the scenes as part of a coalition of Christian advocacy organizations and disability groups while seeking members who could speak from their own experience and expertise. This included medical professionals working in palliative care as well as those particularly vulnerable should the bill pass, including elderly people, ethnic minorities who have less accessBill(FifthSitting)#contribution-CBE7F21E-887B-4941-9869-2C06B446CB11) to palliative care, and those living with disabilities.

Prayer was also pivotal, Edmund said: “Where some people were not confident to meet their MP on the specifics or share their story and provide case studies, they could be holding weekly prayer meetings around their local MP’s decision-making.”

As a heated national conversation developed, some criticized those holding religious beliefs. When the bill initially passed in the House of Commons last summer, conservative MP Nigel Huddleston regretted MPs’ “somewhat dismissive attitude expressed towards those with religious beliefs.” It is “perfectly legitimate for religious beliefs to influence one’s views on assisted dying,” he argued. He said religious people should be “respected, not sneered at.”

Rather than dialing down theological content, the Evangelical Alliance was always “unapologetic” about its standpoint, Edmund said. “We are not removing [our faith] from the table.”

It’s a perspective that resonates with Richard Bastable, a Church of England vicar in West London who penned a public letter opposing the legislation.

“If we try to evacuate our point of view, our opinions, our ethical beliefs, our Christian principles, then we end up saying something that doesn’t really need listening to,” Bastable said.

The letter, which was published in The Daily Telegraph in November 2024, described the assisted dying bill as “a dangerous threat to our society.”

The Christian faith offers a defence of the dignity of life and a call to improve the quality of life for all those living—including those who are dying,” it said. It continued,

To reduce the value of human life to physical and mental capacity and wellbeing has sinister implications for how we as a society view those who experience severe physical or mental issues, and risks that those undergoing such suffering come to see their life as of less value than others.

While Bastable initially sent the letter only to a handful of friends to add their signatures, more than 1,000 members of the clergy, including 15 leading Church of England bishops, ended up signing the letter. But what he found even more remarkable than the number of signatories was the “cross-factionalism consensus” reached: Every wing of the Church of England was represented.

“It’s not always the case that the traditions within the [Church of England] can find common cause over something, especially something that has that edge of controversy about it,” he said. “There was a sense that this was relieving people’s frustration and powerlessness in the face of something they were opposed to, but alone they wouldn’t have known how to voice that opposition.”

Before MPs first debated the bill, Sarah Mullally, then bishop of London, signed an open letter from faith leaders, including the most senior leader of the Roman Catholic Church in the UK, the chief rabbi of Britain, and representatives of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities.

Last year, more than 100 women of different faiths signed another open letter warning that the bill “could create a new tool to harm vulnerable women,” including those in abusive or coercive relationships.

Edmund, who was among the signatories, said unanimity on life issues is not unusual among church leaders: She works regularly with Catholic leadership and the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church. But when it came to assisted dying, she said, the Church of England spoke out “in a way they probably wouldn’t speak out in the way that Catholics and evangelicals do on the beginning of life.” The Church of England holds the belief that life begins at conception but allows for limited conditions—such as threat to the mother’s life or health—where it believes abortion is morally preferable.

Mullally, current Archbishop of Canterbury, has spoken out in the House of Lords (where she is one of 26 bishops who serve as legislators) about how her faith and her experience as a chief nurse led her to reject the bill.

“Moving from nursing into ordained ministry means much of my life has been spent at bedsides alongside people as they cope with suffering and death,” she wrote in The Daily Telegraph shortly before the vote. Christians “have lived experience with those nearing death or on the margins of society, and, above all, we carry a belief that it is hope, not fear, that should guide us.”

On Friday, the hopes of those opposing assisted dying were fulfilled in a narrow vote that saw the legislation fall—at least for now. Opponents composed a diverse coalition. Evangelicals stood with disability advocates, medical professionals, Christians of many different traditions, and philosophers—some of faith and some of none.

For Edmund, it was both a “victory” and a “miracle,” but she is already scanning the horizon: What comes next is not only the return of similar legislation but also a call on the church to continue the conversation about care for those at the end of life. She noted that it was a Christian woman, Dame Cicely Saunders, who pioneered the hospice movement in the country.

“We as a church need to embody that in 2026,” Edmund said. “What is the vision for end-of-life care that we can provide locally, that we are prepared to invest in, to finance, to build institutions around and then create laws that facilitate?”

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